They engaged in an awkward exchange about the day’s events—how much Nora would have liked it, how well the minister had done, Mrs. Robinson’s catering prowess. It was a relief when they’d finally wrung the last possibilities from the conversation and silence was allowed to fall. Jess nibbled on the edge of a water cracker and glanced at the clock. She was aware of her mother’s sterling silver cat tinkling every time she moved, knocking against the small wooden bird pendant. The sound grated. Jess was preparing to make her excuses when Polly took a deep breath and said, “I have something for you.”
Jess felt a wave of confusion. She didn’t want a gift. She was no longer a child of ten. Nora had died, and a trinket would not make it better. But Polly reached into a bag that was sitting on the table beside her and took out a book, sliding it across the surface.
Jess recognized the cover at once, and the dissonance of the moment was dizzying. Disparate elements of her life came together in a most unexpected and inexplicable way. Nora in the hospital—Halcyon... Issy, help me... He’s going to take her from me—the strange immersion in Daniel Miller’s book of the past week, and Polly, the mother she rarely saw, staring at her now with great expectation. “I... I don’t...” stammered Jess. “Where did you... how...?”
“Janey—Mrs. Robinson—told me you’d been asking about it all. I had this book sitting on my shelf at home.”
But that hadn’t been what Jess was going to ask at all. What she’d wanted to know was, how did Polly know about Halcyon and the Turner family? Nora had considered the secret too deep and dark to share. How had Polly found out?
“It was written at the time by a journalist who was living nearby,” Polly continued. “I thought it might answer some of your questions.”
“How do you know about what happened at Halcyon?”
“Nora told me. When I was pregnant with you. In fact, I...”
Jess was reeling. She didn’t know whose betrayal was worse: Polly’s, for having known all this time and said nothing, or Nora’s,for trusting Polly with the truth and not Jess. But it was impossible to feel angry with Nora—to do so would have made her seem even more absent, and Jess couldn’t cope with that, so the needle settled on Polly, who was still chattering away as if nothing were wrong.
Jess stood abruptly and pushed her stool back toward the bench.
“Jess? Are you all right? You haven’t finished.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“But you haven’t eaten all day.”
“I’ll be fine.” Jess paused, hesitated, failed. Her voice was unrecognizable, even to her own ears. “And to be frank, I think it’s a little late in the day for you to start playing the concerned mother. Or the caring daughter, for that matter. You abandoned both of us a long time ago.”
By the time Jess reached the top of the stairs, the brief glow of self-righteousness was already giving way to a sense of guilt. Her mother’s expression had been one of surprise followed by uncertainty, and then her cheeks had reddened and she’d looked crestfallen.
But really, it had been more than Jess could take. The realization that Polly had known about Halcyon and the Turners all along, that Nora had told her, and Jess had been kept in the dark by both, was blinding. The hot ball of emotion and upset she’d experienced as a little girl when she realized that her mother didn’t want her, that she’d been tricked into thinking she was moving to Brisbane, too, that she wasn’t being told the whole truth, was back.
And the incident when she was a baby—one of the most reliable sources of hurt and anger toward her mother—had returned as well, but muddied now by a sense of confusion, because ever since she’d read Daniel Miller’s notes and realized the nature of his tip-off to the police, Nora’s account of what she’d seen Isabel do, Jess had known deep inside her gut that something wasn’t right.
She followed the corridor past the library, but instead of going upstairs to her bed, she turned into Nora’s room. She lay down and pressed her face into the soft edge of her grandmother’s pillow.
After a time, she grew restless. She still had Polly’s copy of Daniel Miller’s book in hand. She lifted it up and inspected the familiar jacket. It was a little different from Nora’s. For one thing, it had a clear plastic cover and a Dewey decimal library classification on the spine.
A piece of paper had been stuck adjacent to the title page with columns of dates stamped in rows. Jess remembered the analogue borrowing system from trips to the library when she was a girl. The last date was April 4, 1978: six months before Jess was born. Another stamp inside the jacket readlibrary of south australia. Interesting. Nora might have been the one to tell Polly about Halcyon, but it appeared that Polly had gone looking for more information herself.
There was something else distinctive about this copy, Jess noticed. Now that she looked closely, she saw a protrusion, an item tucked inside the back cover. Within the sleeve of protective plastic were some sheets of folded paper. She took them out, opened them, and saw that it was photocopied text. Someone had written neatly at the top in blue ink:Addendum, 1980 edition.
Jess sat up straighter against Nora’s pillows. This, then, was the final chapter that Nancy Davis had mentioned. Written after Daniel Miller returned to Australia, when Thea Turner’s remains were found in the garden at Halcyon, ending a twenty-year mystery.
As If They Were Asleep
Daniel Miller
Addendum: Halcyon Revisited
It was said that poor Percy Summers, who’d made the grim discovery, was never the same again. Edith Pigott was told by Maud McKendry, who’d heard it from Meg Summers herself. He’d thought they were asleep. He almost went right by, but his horse, that loyal old girl, Blaze, was hot and tired and in need of a swim—she’d done the walk from the Station down near Meadows, after all—and that’s how he wound up at the water hole and saw the distressing sight. He’d never been able to forget it, especially the youngest girl, the line of ants marching busily over her wrist.
On the first anniversary of the shocking events, Reverend Lawson prepared a special sermon, with prayers at its end for baby Thea. It was his tradition to give a roundup of the year, the community’s struggles and successes, the lives lost and gained; it would have been unthinkable not to mention the Turner family. Besides, everyone in town, each member of his flock, had lived through a trauma that year. The situation itself had been difficult enough to bear, but until the coroner handed down his findings, there’d also been fears that a murderer walked among them. Ned Lawson knew it was his calling to bring peace of mind back to his flock. And how often did the opportunity to tell a local story about sinners and innocents combined present itself?
The following year, Christmas Eve 1961, Reverend Lawson eulogized the Turner family again, but less lyrically this time, and witha restraint to his delivery that conveyed reserve. It was one thing to tell stories that inspired gratitude for community and life while warning against evil, and quite another to dwell on tragedy.
By the third year, mention of the family had been reduced to inclusion in the prayer list for church donors past and present; by year four, an administrative error caused their names to drop completely from the group.
Over the next five years, the Turner family slipped out of everyday conversation. It wasn’t that people forgot so much as that they didn’t always remember. Locals found that they could walk past the end of Willner Road without immediately thinking of the way the four ambulances had formed a convoy that day, driving their sorry load slowly away from the farm; months could go by without anyone mentioning the tragedy, until a news report about wild dogs or a warning about poisonous flowers in the woods or plans for a summer picnic caused someone to sigh with sad recollection and say, “Remember the poor family that used to live up at the Wentworth place?”
